Chanel '25 handbag' Ad Campaign

Review of Chanel ’25 handbag’ Ad Campaign by Director Michel Gondry with Photographer Craig McDean with model Margot Robbie

There’s a lightness to Chanel’s latest campaign, embracing the start of a new era – one shaped by whimsy, familiarity, and a softer kind of authorship. It’s also the campaign making waves across social today, which is no small feat. In a landscape defined by oversaturation, capturing attention requires more than beauty. It requires something people can recognize, question, and return to.

For the Chanel 25 campaign, directed by Michel Gondry and fronted by Margot Robbie, with a cameo from Kylie Minogue, the house draws on the cultural memory of Come Into My World. The reference gives the viewer an immediate entry point—something familiar enough to engage with, yet reworked through Chanel’s lens. What unfolds is a looping structure that places the campaign within a broader cultural conversation around repetition, memory, and presence.

Robbie moves through a Parisian street, encountering versions of herself, each carrying a different iteration of the Chanel 25 bag. The repetition builds a sense of continuity. The Chanel woman exists across moments, across moods, across versions of herself. The bag follows her through it all—not as a statement, but as something integrated into her rhythm.

This is where the campaign resonates. Luxury has been shifting toward something more lived-in, more emotionally accessible. Chanel meets that moment with intention. The repeated gestures and subtle shifts in styling suggest a woman who shapes the world around her simply by moving through it. The fantasy doesn’t sit apart. It lives within the everyday.

Robbie carries this with ease—recognizable, luminous, yet grounded. She makes the concept feel legible. Minogue’s cameo adds a layer of cultural continuity, a quiet acknowledgment of origin that deepens the reference without overwhelming it.

Chanel refines Gondry’s original sense of chaos into something more controlled, more composed. The loops feel lighter, warmer, more whimsical. The world doesn’t unravel as it repeats. It settles into itself. There’s a sense that the Chanel woman brings coherence wherever she goes.

Still, that control leaves a slight distance. The campaign is polished and clear in its intention, but the emotional register stays just below its full potential. The whimsy is there, the warmth is there, but the experience remains contained. It invites, rather than surprises.

Even so, the direction feels meaningful. Chanel has always worked through repetition—codes revisited, symbols carried forward. Here, that idea is made visible. The campaign suggests that luxury today isn’t about stepping outside the everyday, but about moving through it differently. The world repeats. Under Chanel, it begins to shimmer.